Cleanliness
by Robin Siskin
Summary: Zack appreciates cleanliness, but even he knows that there is a time and place for it. [Oneshot, Angela x Zack, Zack x Booth][AUish]


**A/N** – Okay, so the Bones fandom needs a lot more crack pairings. There's way too much Brennan x Booth floating around. BB BB BB BB. I seriously don't even care about that pairing anymore it's been so overdone in fanfics and such. And, Zack needs more love, too, so I'm killing two birds with one stone.

A note on the spellings – I'm spelling the names as they appear on the iTunes summary of the show. Zack IS spelled with a k and not with an h. That's how it appears in Eric Millegan's script.

Enjoy, everyone, and feel free to drop me a comment, or a question, or even a flame. Thank you!

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He is not afraid of intimacy, nor is he afraid of being denied intimacy. He is completely aware of and at ease with the fact that most people would find it difficult to connect on an intimate level with him, and maybe only a smidgen uncomfortable with the fact that he finds it difficult to connect on an intimate level with others. Relationships do, after all, mean little to nothing in his line of work. If anything, they make matters more difficult in the long run. Time management is difficult enough already without having to juggle a lover. Or two.

And yet, as he pulls on his shoes and tries not to make any noise that might wake up Angela, he feels, just for a moment, a slight twinge of jealousy towards the pillow that she has a stranglehold on. She is drooling on it, and what little lipstick was left on her lips when she went to sleep has left a smear of fuchsia on its otherwise tidy surface, and even though some people might not exactly jump to be jealous of the kind of attention the pillow is receiving, he has enough experience to know that love, and intimacy, the kind of love and intimacy that is real or at least imagined strongly enough to be real by both parties involved that it offers the same feelings, is never clean. The kind of love romanticized in movies where moments like kissing in the pouring rain or upside down or what have you (it's not that he's seen movies like this, you know, but he's been around _him _and_ her_ long enough to have realized the gist of such things), where the two lovers are always young, attractive, and the opposite sex and enjoy such outings as visiting a park or going out on boat rides or drives in the country-side, that kind of love is not real. It is clean, contrived, cut out from a mold designed to capture the public's appreciation for things that are clean. It is cleanliness that the public understands and can sympathize with. It is a desire of every human being to have emotions that are neat and tidy and wrapped up in a little package with a bow on it, emotions that are easily discernable. Zack appreciates these kinds of emotions too, appreciates emotional cleanliness, probably appreciates these easily detected emotions much more than the general public does, but even he knows that some things are better when they are not wrapped up in wax paper and delivered to your front doorstep. Some things, like love, must be experienced in their purest form in order to be truly experienced.

He supposes that it might be the public's obsession with clean-cut love that causes so many failed marriages and relationships overall. He has seen the rise and fall of the relationship between Angela and Hodgins (not even a drooling idiot could miss that one), the ridiculously drawn out courtship between Dr. Brennan and Booth (he would have to be blind not to see it), and even the edges of Booth's relationship with his ex-wife, and he knows that, to some extent, in all these cases their failures result from the obsession with clean love on the part of at least one party in each relationship. Angela could care less about whether or not a relationship is clean or not, but Hodgins is the kind who, despite his hobbies which often deny him closure on anything, demands it from a relationship. The kind of rough and tumble way that Angela deals with her men, the same way a cat plays with a frightened parakeet once it finally manages to get it out of its cage and break one or both of its wings, is not suitable to the way Hodgins needs his relationship conducted. And, while Booth seems to be the kind of man who likes his women the way he likes his food, eclectic and spontaneous, he is always chasing after Dr. Brennan who is anything but eclectic and spontaneous and wants nothing less than a male version of herself in a man, which catapults them into an endless cycle of disaster and failed attempts at establishing this clean love between themselves, which is, speaking purely from the way past attempts have worked out, impossible. Booth cannot even completely break off his relationship with his ex-wife, and not just because he has a child with her.

It is simply difficult for people to establish a functioning relationship when they apply such ridiculous principles of cleanliness. Zack appreciates cleanliness, but even he knows that there is a time and place for it.

And yet, as he slips through Booth's front door and finds him on the couch waiting for something that might not exactly be him, Zack thinks that it is ironic how all these principles get thrown out the window when these people look at things from a more primal point of view. When they look at things through rose-tinted glasses, seeing everything as an opportunity to exercise those ridiculous Shakespearean notions of romanticism and cleanliness, nothing lives up to their expectations, and things eventually fail. However, when they see things as an opportunity to release pent-up sexual energy, gauge the possibilities for them to fill their bodily needs, everything is somehow beautiful. It is messy, God yes, _sex _itself is messy, but it is more fulfilling. Zack knows that he is more fulfilled by these kinds of things, and he suspects that the people he does them with are more fulfilled by them than they would be by doing pointless empty gestures such as the ones they see in the movies. He _knows _that Booth must be more fulfilled by them, because so far they have been doing more or less the same thing on a schedule that rarely changes for more than three months with little change in the way they see each other, and Dr. Brennan and Booth have been doing more or less the same thing on a schedule that rarely changes for even longer than that with a great deal of change in the way they see each other, these changes sometimes not positive ones. And, on some level, he thinks he _knows _that Angela is more fulfilled by them. There is always a sense of release in sleep, but she looks so peaceful when she is sleeping after, and that kind of peace is never present on her face after she is finished beating around the bush with Hodgins. She never looks sad or upset after she is through with Hodgins, but there is always a tightness to her shoulders or face or a distracted look to her smile that even Zack, with his admittedly limited insight into both the human psyche and in reading faces, knows should not exist after a satisfying discourse with another being. Maybe, in some way, for them, the beneficial quality of his relationships with each of them has something to do with there being no romantic attraction between them. At least, no conventional romantic attraction. Him and Booth are both male, which is probably where the relief comes about for Booth, and in any other case Angela would not look twice at Zack; they are simply not compatible (arguably, him and Booth are not compatible, either, but that probably has little standing next to the fact that they are both male). A lack of conventional compatibility makes it impossible to engage in conventional romantic behavior, makes it impossible to make the love clean. And, even if the both of them aren't aware, Zack knows full and well that it is probably better this way.

Even though Zack enjoys and appreciates cleanliness, he knows better than anyone that when it comes to love, messiness is usually healthier.


End file.
